Timo Arnall

Timo is a designer at Apple.

Previously he was the co-founder of Playdeo and Ottica, working with design, games, product invention, filmmaking, photography and strategy, in particular working with Google ATAP, Google AR & VR and other special projects.

Timo’s design, photography and filmmaking work is about developing and explaining emerging technologies through visual invention, films, visualisations, products and new interactions.

He led the research project ‘Touch’ investigating RFID, NFC and physical interaction with everyday objects. As creative director at BERG, he worked alongside an extraordinary team to design, visualise and communicate a wide range of work for clients such as Google, Intel and Dentsu. In particular our work on Mag+ was called out as ‘really, really breakthrough’ by Steve Jobs.

Timo started his career as a digital and visual effects supervisor on animated films and commercials, introducing award winning animators, filmmakers, artists and choreographers to emerging tools such as Brilliance, Deluxe Paint, Softimage Eddie, 3D Studio Max, SGI workstations and Amiga digital video I/O. Inspired by the likes of Jef Raskin’s Humane Interface, Andy Cameron’s Dissimulations and the early signs of a more ‘designed’ web experience Timo began designing and developing web and mobile interfaces in 2000.

He has a bachelors degree in filmmaking and a PhD in interaction design.

Photography

Photography has run alongside the design and film work for as long as I can remember. The method settled around 2002, in a short statement I wrote for an exhibition:

As a filmmaker, used to working with images changing 25 frames every second, I have been using digital photography as a narrative medium, taking sequences of photographs to suggest movement, place, stories, journeys and discovery. I never use the viewfinder. The screen allows for photographic framing and composition so that the camera rarely gets in the way of the experience.

What has accumulated since is a long daily diary, mostly unannotated, the photographs titled with nothing but the timestamp they were taken at. The Photography section reads it as bodies of work.

Exhibitions

• 2019 Design Museum, London. Beazley Designs of the Year 2019, Digital category. Avo.
• 2015–2016 Somerset House, London. Big Bang Data, with Internet Machine opening the show.
• 2015 Transmediale, Berlin. Internet Machine as a three-screen installation.
• 2015 Fundación Telefónica, Madrid (Feb–May). Big Bang Data, with Internet Machine.
• 2014 CCCB, Barcelona (9 May – 26 Oct). Big Bang Data, premiering Internet Machine. Co-curated by José Luis de Vicente and Olga Subiros.
• 2013 De Hallen Haarlem (7 Sep – 24 Nov). Dread, with Satellite Lamps and Robot Readable World. Endorsed by Bruce Sterling: ‘Hey, I’d go.’
• 2013 Lighthouse, Brighton (5 Sep – 13 Oct). Immaterials survey show, Brighton Digital Festival, with Jack Schulze, Matt Jones, Einar Sneve Martinussen and Jørn Knutsen.
• 2012 LABoral Centro de Arte, Gijón. Invisible Fields.
• 2011 MoMA, New York (24 Jul – 7 Nov). Talk to Me, curated by Paola Antonelli. Five works on display: Immaterials: Ghost in the Field, Nearness, Media Surfaces, The Journey, Suwappu.
• 2011 V&A, London (6 Sep – 2 Jan). Power of Making, V&A / Crafts Council partnership, curated by Daniel Charny.
• 2011 London Transport Museum, London. Sense and the City.
• 2010 LABoral, Gijón. HABITAR — Bending the Urban Frame, with Wireless in the World as a multi-screen installation.
• 2009 Nordes 3, Oslo. Engaging Artifacts, with the Touch interactive exhibition.
• 2008 DogA, Oslo. Unge Talenter, with Sniff and Bowl.

Beyond the named institutional shows, the Touch and Immaterials work has appeared in smaller settings in Norway, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK. MoMA holds an artist record at moma.org/artists/39373.

Press

The work has been written about most substantially by:

• Adam Greenfield, On Immaterials (Speedbird, October 2009). A long commissioned essay on Ghost in the Field, framing the Hong Kong Octopus and Tokyo Suica systems and arguing for design as a translation discipline for invisible infrastructures.
• Fast Company / Co.Design on Light Painting WiFi (‘a delightful fusion of low and high-tech’) and on Robot Readable World (‘a haunting piece of design fiction’).
• Slate / The Eye on Internet Machine (‘a short film that pulls back the curtain on the cloud’).
• TIME photo essay, Inside the Internet Machine.
• Designboom on Internet Machine.
• Vice on Internet Machine and on Robot Readable World.
• Wired on Internet Machine.
• The Economist on Big Bang Data.
• Cory Doctorow on No to NoUI, Boing Boing (‘well-argued … great and provocative points’). Frank Chimero wrote a long companion piece, The Cloud is Heavy.
• Bruce Sterling, An Essay on the New Aesthetic (Medium, 2012), with Robot Readable World as a central touchstone. Sterling covered Light Painting WiFi, Dread and other work multiple times in Wired Beyond the Beyond; the Wired blog has been offline since 2020 but the Wayback Machine has the posts.
• Eye Magazine #80. Change Through Making, a manifesto with Jack Schulze.
• Royal Statistical Society Significance. Peer-reviewed article on Light Painting WiFi.
• Game Developer and Dan Hill‘s four-part essay on Avo and the new grammar of television and games.
• Discovery Channel programming featured the Light Painting WiFi visual technique. BBC Newsnight featured Making Future Magic.

Other coverage in The Guardian, HOLO, Icon, RIBA Journal, Electric Sheep, Gizmodo, Designboom, and a long list of design and tech blogs.

Talks

From the nearfield.org publications archive and BERG / Ottica / Playdeo years:

• 2014 AHO / HiOA, Oslo (12 Jun). PhD doctoral defence, Making Visible. Trial lecture: Remaking the cultural construction of immateriality through discursive design.
• 2012 Frontiers of Interaction, Rome (7–8 Jun). Keynote on the ‘Talking objects’ session.
• 2012 Vimeo Festival + Awards, New York City (7 Jun). Light Painting WiFi finalist.
• 2011 CIID Open Lecture, Copenhagen, with Jack Schulze.
• 2009 LIFT, Marseille (19 Jun). Making Things Visible. Archived at videos.liftconference.com.
• 2009 PICNIC, Amsterdam (24 Sep). Web of Things special event.
• 2009 Barcelona Design Week (29 Oct). Designing from the web to the world.
• 2009 VERDIKT programme, Oslo (4 Nov). A model of user experience in networked products.
• 2009 Sensing and Sensuality, Umeå (27 Mar). Making Visible.
• 2008 Web 2.0 Expo Europe (23 Oct). The web in the world. Slides at slideshare.net/tmo.
• 2008 Foo Camp, Sebastopol (14 Jul).
• 2008 Stamen Design + Adaptive Path, San Francisco (16 Jul). Visible, present, branded.
• 2008 Design Engaged, Montreal (5 Oct). Visible, present, branded.
• 2008 Sarasota Design Summit (29 Oct). Visualisation, simulation and evidence.
• 2007 Recalling RFID, Amsterdam (19 Oct). RFID as material in design.
• 2007 Mobile Camp NYC (19 May), Xtech 2007 (17 May). Physical hyperlinks.
• 2006 Reboot 8, Copenhagen (1–2 Jun). Digital services and physical things.
• 2005 Design Engaged, Berlin (13 Nov). A graphic language for Touch-based interactions.

And at IXDA, Design of Understanding, Oslo LUX, the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, MoMo Amsterdam, the Museum of London, and other venues during the BERG / Ottica years where the public record is patchier.

Teaching

• Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), 2004–2014. Taught interaction and industrial design. Instrumental in founding the Interaction Design programme.
• Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID), 2010 onwards. Taught the GUI class on the Interaction Design programme; ongoing visiting faculty.
• Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå.
• Royal College of Art, London.
• Institute for Advanced Architecture (IAAC), Barcelona.
• Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII), student advisor.
• Bartlett UCL, London. Guest lecture, 2006.

Awards and recognition

• 2019 Design Museum, London. Beazley Designs of the Year, Digital category. Avo.
• 2019 Apple App Store Game of the Day. Avo.
• 2012 Vimeo Awards, finalist. Light Painting WiFi.
• 2011 MoMA permanent collection. Five works (Talk to Me, 2011): Immaterials: Ghost in the Field, Nearness, Media Surfaces, The Journey, Suwappu.
• 2010 Steve Jobs called the work on Mag+ ‘really, really breakthrough’ (referenced in Apple commentary).
• Apple App Store featured Avo as ‘a magical adventure with the production values of a kids’ TV show’.

Publications

Roughly 13 academic papers and one PhD thesis, with about 716 citations on Google Scholar.

• 2014 Arnall, T. Making Visible: Mediating the material of emerging technology. PhD thesis, Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). 178 pages, 53 illustrations. Defended 12 June 2014. Available via AHO’s open-access archive ADORA, and from the post on this site.
• 2014 Arnall, T. ‘Exploring “Immaterials”: Mediating Design’s Invisible Materials.’ International Journal of Design, 8(2). ijdesign.org.
• 2014 Martinussen, E. S., Knutsen, J., & Arnall, T. ‘Satellite Lamps.’ Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 19(1). kairos.technorhetoric.net.
• 2013 Arnall, T., Knutsen, J., & Martinussen, E. S. ‘Immaterials: Light painting WiFi.’ Significance, 10. Royal Statistical Society / Wiley. doi:10.1111/j.1740-9713.2013.00683.x.
• 2013 Arnall, T. ‘Fear of the Invisible.’ Book chapter.
• 2013 Arnall, T. ‘No to NoUI.’ Essay, elasticspace.com.
• 2011 Morrison, A., Arnall, T., Knutsen, J., Martinussen, E. S., & Nordby, K. ‘Towards Discursive Design.’ Proceedings of IASDR2011, Delft.
• 2011 Morrison, A. & Arnall, T. ‘Visualizations of Digital Interaction in Daily Life.’ Computers and Composition, 28(3), 224–234.
• 2010 Arnall, T. & Martinussen, E. S. ‘Depth of Field: Discursive Design Research Through Film.’ FORMakademisk, 3(1), 100–122.
• 2009 Martinussen, E. S. & Arnall, T. ‘Designing with RFID.’ Proceedings of TEI ’09 (Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction).
• 2007 Martinussen, E. S., Knutsen, J., & Arnall, T. ‘Bowl: Token-based media for children.’ Proceedings of DUX ’07, Chicago. ACM, New York, 3–16.
• 2006 Arnall, T. ‘A graphic language for touch-based interactions.’ Proceedings of Mobile HCI 2006, Espoo.
• 2005 Arnall, T. ‘Marking in Public Space.’ Proceedings of Engaging the City workshop, CHI 2005, Portland, OR.
• 2016 Work featured in Photoviz (Gestalten), the photography-as-visualisation survey volume.

Patents

Co-inventor on four granted US patents.

• US10789781B2. Interactive frame-synchronized augmented video. Filed August 2019, granted September 2020. Inventors: Jack Schulze, Timo Arnall, Nicholas Ludlam. Originally assigned to Playdeo Limited; reassigned to Apple Inc. in February 2024. Underlies the runtime in Avo.
• US10936085B2. Gesture detection and interactions. Filed January 2020, granted March 2021. Inventors: Ivan Poupyrev, Carsten Schwesig, Jack Schulze, Timo Arnall, Durrell Grant Bevington Bishop. Assigned to Google LLC. The widest-claim continuation in the Project Soli family.
• US10203763B1. Gesture detection and interactions. Filed October 2015, granted February 2019. Same inventor team. Earlier continuation in the same family.
• US10088908B1. Gesture detection and interactions. Filed September 2015, granted October 2018. Same inventor team. The first granted patent in the family.

A fifth application, US20160349845A1, Gesture Detection Haptics and Virtual Tools (filed May 2016, with Ivan Poupyrev, Carsten Schwesig and Jack Schulze), did not progress to grant.

@timoarnall / Flickr / Tumblr / LinkedIn

timo at elasticspace dot com